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Inhale. He pivoted on his heel, tightened his grip on the blade, and shoved the intruder into a silver beam of moonlight. Exhale.
Raven hair, golden skin, depthless eyes. The soft curve of dark lips.
“Kulsum,” Nasir breathed. His jambiya clattered to the ground. His hands slid to her face, and he cupped her smooth skin between his palms. He brushed his thumbs over her cheeks and the tension across his shoulders uncoiled. She stared back with the same hunger Nasir had seen when Altair’s eyes followed the server girl.
Maybe it was the dark. Or the desire on her face, which he hadn’t seen closely in so many months. Or maybe it was the mess in his mind and the way Altair had asked about her.
He didn’t stop to consider why she was in his rooms while he had been away with Altair.
No—he kissed her.
His lips slanted down to her mouth, his hands went to her hair, and his body pressed against hers. She kissed him back just as greedily, her hands reaching for his cloak and pulling him closer. In that moment, they weren’t a prince and a servant; they were two people, equal and one.
Rimaal, he had missed her. This girl, his mother’s servant who had become so much more after the sultana’s death. His shard of a heart raced and heat rushed through him. But when her lips parted with his, her hands lost in his hair, he froze. He remembered.
He remembered everything.
He stepped back, and Kulsum stared with wide, unreadable eyes. He wished the moon would reveal more than what he saw.
“Leave,” he whispered hoarsely.
She didn’t move. Neither of them breathed. This was pain worse than a sword. This was forgetting and then remembering everything afresh, the curse of memories.
“Get. Out.” This time, his words were a blade.
Altair was right: some people didn’t deserve to forget.
Kulsum tipped her head. She reached up, slowly, as if he might back away, and when he didn’t, she trailed her fingers across his right cheek, as she had done so many times before. His eyes fluttered for the briefest moment, and then she left without a word, dress billowing. What could she say?
She no longer had a tongue, and it was because of him that she did not.
CHAPTER 9
Night had fallen heavily across Demenhur, bringing a phantom silence with it. Snow swirled in wheezing gasps, and Zafira drew her scarf over her face. She was hooded and shrouded, yet it was easy to discern the Hunter, for chances of finding a man in the western villages with a sling of arrows across his back were impossible—she couldn’t even count herself. She smirked at her own joke. Yasmine would have snorted. Skies, she isn’t dead.
Zafira guided Sukkar up the sloping white streets, where houses stood like misshapen teeth. They were the tan stone and colorless mortar common in the desert.
Only, Demenhur was no longer the desert oasis it had been. She sighed, her breath clouding in the cursed cold, and pressed on.
The sooq was ghostly beneath the moon. The forlorn jumu’a boasted no sign of the wedding that had taken place mere hours before. Zafira passed Araby’s colorful sweet shop, the shutters pulled tight like those of most other shops in the sooq. Ornaments dangled on shop eaves, swaying eerily in the breeze.
She halted Sukkar before a shop well-known for catering to the jobless superstitious. Through the dark window, she saw grimy glass bottles glinting from the shelves, filled with Arawiya-knew-what. They were meant to be hung in the four corners of a house to deter ifrit, creatures of smokeless fire that could adopt the face of anyone, usually their victim’s loved ones. Despite not being able to wield magic the way humans and safin could, ifrit had wreaked havoc worse than either race before the Six Sisters of Old.
Each of the six hailed from the most prominent clans, united by their desire for a better world, rather than by blood. What intrigued Zafira most was what they were: si’lah, creatures mere humans couldn’t comprehend. Creatures not even the lofty safin could fathom standing beside as equals, let alone a handful of levels apart.
Once the Sisters had gathered their foes, the insidious ifrit included, they had no place to imprison them, until one Sister stepped forward with a plan. She was stronger than the others, for her heart was pure and she was adamant in her ideals.
On Sharr, the island she was to govern, she created an impenetrable prison where the Sisters jailed the creatures that plagued their people and where she reigned as its warden.
The ornaments hanging from the shop swayed, the strike of metal against metal drawing Zafira out of her thoughts. She eyed those glass bottles and wondered if they worked. If ifrit still roamed Arawiya, invisible to the eye or donning a human’s body.
She tugged her scarf back over her mouth and was just about to press Sukkar onward when tiny clay lions in the frontmost display caught her eye, sending a s
hiver down her spine. She didn’t know what the clay felines were supposed to fend off, because the Lion of the Night was dead.
The Lion’s mother was ifrit, and his safin father fought to keep him from being banished with the rest of her kind. But life in the safin caliphate of Alderamin proved more difficult, because pure-blooded safin bore a pride that none could rival. They murdered his father. Banned the Lion from magic. Crushed his core.
Baba always used the example of the Lion whenever he taught Zafira of oppression. Because the Lion did not let the safin crush him. He turned to Alderamin’s greatest asset—knowledge. He learned all there was, empowering himself with forbidden blood magic.
